Changed the accounting of my life insurance

In Switzerland, the third pillar of retirement can be either in a bank account or in the form of a life insurance. The bank account option is the obvious solution. This is a special form of life insurance. You will get some part of your capital back at the retirement age (65 years old currently). In the case you die, your spouse will get the capital. Moreover, most of these insurance policies also cover the case where you cannot pay any more. Not if you stop paying, of course. But if you become handicapped or unable to work. In this case, the insurance will cover your fee while you can’t work.

I am not sure this is a good deal for everybody. But I think it is a good deal for me. My future spouse does not yet work and will not have a full retirement pension once she retires. Thus, if I pass away, she will have a good cover from my life insurance. For some people, it is also a good way to force them to contribute to their retirement savings.

I pay 300 CHF each month for this insurance. Until now, I have always counted that as an expense in my budget. But, I now realize it is not really an expense. It is similar to the payment I do to my bank third pillar. And I do not account for these as expenses. This is an investment. So, I decided to remove this recurring expense from my budget. Since we are close to the beginning of the year, I also decided to remove it from January 2018 and February 2018. This means that my savings rate is better in these two months. It is now 33% in January and 4.2% in February. I will update the Savings Rates shortly.

However, my Net Worth does not get better since the current value of the insurance is 0 CHF. If you take out the insurance in the early years, you lose everything. In fact, I will start accounting the insurance as Net Worth in September 2018. I believe this makes my accounting better and more accurate.

What about you? How do you account for your retirement life insurance? Do you have one?

I think pension planning highly depends on long-terms plans. I lived in different countries, now in Switzerland, and probably won’t retire here, so I want to have an opportunity to cash out pillars 2 and 3a in a few years, which is not possible with life insurance. However, I do have life insurance provided by employer. For 3a I went, as Cashflow, with VIAC’s “Global 100”.

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